Since this is a voluntary/enrichment activity let's try to get each student to have fun learning first. I am going to give you the first set of material that can be studied, but you should pick and choose it and stick with it only if the student is enjoying it. Quiz bowl players like to know things. Catholic quiz bowl players like to know the most important things and they like to know why.  Location and time are the great settings for everything temporal. The first thing each child needs is a huge map and a bunch of stick pins. Timelines are also great, as are encyclopedias. But the greatest information about a given era's relevance is its culture: art, literature, music, political systems, entertainment, economic systems, inventions and all the great men and women who contribute to the best of a particular society's culture. Biographies, novels, and history books (best if original source materials) go far to give details to these traits. Once quiz bowl players start to see that questions are organized in this manner, they start to file away facts and ideas in these categories of time, location, and culture. If we go into depth reading about these things (as opposed to memorizing them just to know them), they become a part of what we know and believe (etched in long-term memory--episodic always the most long-lasting).  After they start to get a feel for the questions and the way that they describe the essence of each of the many people, places, and things, Catholic  quiz bowl players need to know these facts so they can know the big picture. Math is often the deciding factor between competitive versus non-competitive teams--we always spend a little time in math competition (some players do Math Counts or Minnesota Junior High Math League).